The Sean McDowell Show - Real Questions and Answers about the Bible

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Are the Gospels anonymous? Is the Bible hopelessly filled with contradictions? Has the text of the New Testament been corrupted over time? In this video, I interview Dr. William Mounce regarding his recent book "Why I Trust the Bible."READ: Why I Trust the Bible, by William D. Mounce (https://amzn.to/3pSYm5c)WATCH: Avoiding Big Mistakes In Defending the Bible (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPXY2PF7eB0)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

All right, friends, thanks for joining us today. We are wrestling with the question of, can we trust the Bible as being reliable? We're going to look at questions like we've heard from many skeptics that the disciples would not have remembered the apostles when they wrote down the Gospels and the books in the New Testament.

We're going to look at, were the Gospels anonymous? We're going to look at contradictions. Even look at the character of the Old Testament God. So whether you are a Christian or a skeptic, I think you're gonna find today's conversation very helpful. My guest today, Dr. Bill Mounts, has written a book that I think is fantastic. It's called Why I Trust the Bible. It's a popular level book, but Bill, as you know, I've compiled books like Evidence and Demands of

Verdict with my father and probed into these a lot and a lot of this I Knew because I've researched this topic, but there were a number of times I paused I was like that's a really fresh helpful insight So I think your book and this interview will be interesting to scholars who've looked at this But also to lay people trying to make sense of whether they can trust the Bible So Bill, thanks for coming on and for writing an excellent book. Thank you, thank you. You pointed out an interesting issue

and that is I try to write it doing academic background work, but write it for 17 year olds who are freshmen in the university and then their parents who are sitting there watching their kids walk away from the faith. So it really had to hit both those two age groups and how to deal with the real issues and real answers. So it was a fun book to write, but a bit of a challenge.

Well, we're going to jump into some of those challenges, but in case our audience is not familiar with you, what training do you bring to this question that maybe gives you a unique angle to whether or not we should trust the Bible? Well, one is I did a PhD in Aberdeen in Scotland under Howard Marshall and Daryl Bach and Craig Blomberg were two of my best friends and you'll see their names all the way through the book. And so not only did I get professionally trained but I had I've got a really great great network of friends that I've been able to bounce ideas off and work with. I was the New Testament Chair of the ESV

and I'm currently on the CBT that controls the text of the NIV. So especially when it comes to translation work or just Greek work in general, it's been interesting to be able to have a really two different experiences working with the text. As you know, most of my work has been done in biblical Greek textbooks and references books.

So I get really comfortable when I'm in issues of text criticism and the text itself. Well, that was actually my favorite part of your book. And we're gonna get to that as you described the difference between the Alexandrian, the Western, kind of these Byzantine lines of texts. We're gonna come to that, because it raises the question, why is there an Acts tradition that's about 8.5% longer than another kind of manuscripts we have?

We're gonna get into that, but before we specifically get to the gospels, I thought your opening chapter was excellent, because there's a lot of people who question just the existence of Jesus and who question what we can know of Jesus outside of the scriptures. Now as soon as somebody says, what do you know of Jesus outside of the Bible? I immediately say, even if we had no evidence outside of the Bible, I still think we have good reason to trust the New Testament text and tradition itself. But set that aside, you have this list where you list about 14 things.

You don't necessarily have to read all of them. But when we look in kind of the first and the second century, what are some of the facts that you think are most significant about the life of Jesus we can know completely apart from the New Testament? Yeah, it's on page seven. I had 14 things. Jesus was a Jew who lived in the first century. People actually believed that he was born out of wedlock,

which kind of gets at the virgin birth, at least their version of it. Conflict with the Jewish authorities. Some people thought he was the Messiah, crucified under Pontius Pilate Was hung according to one Jewish tradition and they believed that he was raised from the dead So I mean that's just some of the highlights but there actually is quite a bit of information you can gain and what's remarkable too about the Sean is

Jesus was a relatively unimportant during his his life, a relatively unimportant person who lived in an incredibly unimportant place in the Roman Empire, and that we know anything about him from outside sources is quite remarkable. But then you've got the two references in Josephus, you have four Roman historians, you have two Greek historians,

and so, or at least writers. And so there actually is a lot of evidence that how Jewish Jesus mythicism is called ever got started is a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, why would we think that the single most important person in the history of the world, whether you're a Christian or not, I don't think you can argue that point, that he didn't exist. Yeah, I agree. From the New Testament writers, which is a number of different books, to the early Christians, to the non-Christians, Greek and Jewish and Roman,

the evidence is just too compelling, minimally to doubt that he existed. And this list also includes, like from Josephus, that Jesus had a brother James. Some of his other family details. I mean what we know about him is significant and especially because his ministry was probably two to three years. He had no political power, no military position. I actually think it's remarkable what we do have. Now one of the criticisms that's come up lately, this seems to be a lot of skeptical discussion

is about memory. And there's been some good studies that have shown over time memory changes, we forget things, we remember what we want to forget what we don't. This seems to be a fair good challenge to the Gospels written minimally decades after the events themselves. So why should we believe, number one, that their memory is reliable and not this constructive memory filling in just what they want to have Jesus have said and believed? Yeah, I think for people like us who don't live in an oral culture, it is a hard to get our minds around this and to really understand it. But an oral culture, which Jesus lived in, is a culture that passes

on its truth by word of mouth. And so there's a totally different mindset when it comes to memory. And all you have to do is look at some of the historical references we have. It was common for Greek school children to memorize the entire Iliad and Odyssey. That's 200,000 words. It wasn't uncommon for Jewish rabbis to memorize the entire Hebrew scripture. That's a lot more than 200,000. I mean, I have a friend that's memorized, in his case, the RSV word for word. He knows it perfectly. He also memorized the Greek New Testament word for word perfectly. And we look at that and go, that's just a freak of nature. But it's not that when you live in a culture that passes on traditions, on teachings, theology stories, by word of mouth, God made our brains a lot more capable than I think

we understand they are. We who don't live in an oral culture. So yeah, so it's amazing. You know, and lined up and person one says something to person two, you know, and you get down to 15th person, and it's nothing like what the first person said. But that's nothing like what how oral tradition works, is that first of all, it wasn't private, it was public. There were checks and balances. This is group memorizing and passing it on to other members who form their groups and pass it on. There's, it's just, there's many ways in which the oral culture of Jesus' century is totally unlike the telephone game. And certainly maybe one of the most important is that what's at stake. I mean, in the telephone game, you almost want to make a mistake because it's kind of funny. But their lives depended upon an accurate recitation of the actions and the teachings of Jesus. So there's everything at stake.

And while I may not remember everything I've learned about the Holocaust, I'll bet you if your dad or mom were Jews at Auschwitz, I bet you remember the details really, really well. One of the points that you bring up that I've heard Craig Blomberg make as well is that the way Jesus taught lent itself to being remembered. I mean, stories, studies show that when you speak, people later remember, I think it's within 24 hours, like maybe 10% of what you said on a good 24-hour period, but what they remember are the stories.

So Jesus tell, go ahead. Well, I'll just say, yes, stories are transcultural. I think that's one reason Jesus did it, but also they're much easier to remember. Yeah, Craig's done a tremendous amount of work in this, and I really appreciate his book and point people to it all the time. But the whole Talmudic form of teaching was repetition.

Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. And it's not like, you know, when I teach New Testament survey, I say something once and I expect the students to remember it because they're writing it down. Okay, that's a non-oral culture. But Jesus, it's, you repeat it over and over and over and over again.

And you can make slight alterations. I don't think that the sermon on the Mount Matthew and the sermon on the plane in Luke are the same thing, even though they're very similar, because, you know, once you kind of figure out the beatitude structure, you can. It's a good thing to use. It's a good thing to repeat. And so why not say blessed are the blessed are the blessed are that? But there have means slight changes but the point is is all this repetition going on and

It just really helps people memorize Craig also. I don't think I'm this is a book but Craig house I had a really good point. I'm not sure if I read it or reset it to me, but it was like There were no distractions for them. I mean they listened to a little Jewish boy and girl Okay, you're gonna get it in school. You're going to get it at the home. You're going to learn by reading the Bible. There's no texting. There's no video games.

I mean, the whole life was defined by the Hebrew Scriptures, if you were a Jewish kid. And so you just learned to memorize and learn and you heard it over and over and over again. I think that is part of why I trust oral tradition in the New Testament as well. And the other reason, and you're not gonna convince a skeptic with this,

but I think it's reassuring to a Christian is that Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would help the disciples remember everything he did and said. So that's not going to sway a Bart Ehrman. Okay. I understand that. But for me to know that there was a supernatural element in the process of the God of the gospel is being written.

That's a big deal for me. So I appreciate that. You know, I, I'm a professor at Biola Talbot, you know, but also travel and speak. And if I find a story that works, I use it over and over again. And arguably, maybe too many times if I love a certain story. Jesus was an itinerant preacher with a different audience. So it makes perfect sense that he would tell the same stories over and over again, reinforcing it in the minds of his apostles.

When it comes to Gospels, the big one that comes up is that they're anonymous and hence we can't trust them. Now technically they are anonymous. They didn't say the gospel according to Matthew at the top like our modern-day Bibles do. One way is to say even if they're anonymous it doesn't mean we throw the testimony out and I think something could be said to that.

But you think we have very good reason to believe that the Gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Why? Yeah. And I am really thankful for the work of Martin Hengel and Craig Evans because they are doing and Simon Gothengold because they're really doing some good work in this area. It is true that the gospels do not have the author's name embedded into the text,

like Paul puts his name in the letters. Okay, that's for sure. But that doesn't mean they're anonymous. And what Craig Evans has done is he's looked at all the early manuscripts of the gospels where we actually have the first part. And in every single case he says the author's name is there Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. So actually I would probably rephrase

what you said earlier we do have the names attached to the gospels when we have the first part of the ancient manuscript and Simon has a little more technical argument, but that's basically what he's getting at. You know, the work of Martin Hengel, though, I think is just as important. And he points out that the ancient testimony to the authorship of the Gospels is unanimous. The only name ever attached to the first gospel is Matthew.

The only name ever attached to the first gospel is Matthew The only name ever attached to the second is Mark and when you look at the incredibly rapid rise of Christianity through the ancient world How did that happen? How did the people in one area of the world and another area of the world come up with the same name? Well, there has to have been very early and very strong traditions that Matthew wrote the gospel, there Mark and Luke and John. And so even if the names aren't embedded, the fact that the test, there's no other name is attached to the first gospel but Matthew. There has to be a reason for that. And I think it has to the church knew early on early on very easily who the authors were. And then that goes along though with Papias' and the other early church fathers

that clearly stated who wrote the four Gospels. And Papias, of course, is writing in the early part of the second century. So this is the generation afterwards and is very, very early. I've always found it fascinating that if, and you make this point, that if the early church is going to invent certain authors and attribute them to the books, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not the most likely names. Matthew, a tax collector, would raise certain questions. Mark, according to Papias, as you indicate, is writing the memoirs of Peter, so why not call it the Gospel according to Peter?

It seems that they care about getting it right, that Mark penned it. Luke was not one of the apostles and admits in the start of his book that he's not an eyewitness. Maybe John, but even the Gospel of John doesn't explicitly identify which John it is, and we have to kind of piece it together.

So, you see these apocryphal gospels showing up later, Gospel of Peter, right? That makes sense. Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Thomas. If you're going to invent them, that seems to be who you would pick. That seems to just add the corroborative case that these were written by the people whose names are attributed to them. Yeah and it also indicates how important authorship was to the early church. In my commentary on the pastoral is I had to spend pages and pages and the whole issue of pseudepigraphy and how the argument is made that well the early church

didn't really care who wrote these letters and there's just not a shred of physical evidence that that's the case. And that every evidence that we have, when the church knew that a book was not written by the person who claimed to have written it, they threw it out. 3 Corinthians and the letter to the Laodiceans, I mean, they're chucked as soon as the church fathers

realized that they weren't written by the people who they claimed to be. And but, you know, sometimes the argument is couched in slightly different terms. And they'll say things like, well, they weren't really interested in the authorship. I guess that's the same question. But Mark is, I was going to say it differently,

but it just came out that way. Mark is a great example. Everybody knew because of papiases and other people's instructions that Mark was writing the memoirs of Peter, however you wanna translate that difficult word. This was Peter's recollection and Mark was writing it down. I think Mark wrote it down

because I think Peter actually wrote Second Peter in his terrible Greek and Peter didn't want to write his own gospel and I'm presumably mark is better at Greek. But anyway, that's a side note the Fact that everyone knew the second gospel was written really by Peter But they called it the gospel of mark Why because they thought it was really important to attach the right name to these gospels. So I think authorship was, the authorship was tied into the credibility. Did they get it right? Were the authors in a place to know the right information? And it also comes in the issue of canonicity as well. So I think the authorship is a really

important thing. Another challenge that often comes up to Reliability Bible is the seeming difference in message between Jesus and between Paul. And sometimes when you read it on the surface, it does seem like they're saying different things that are either a different message or arguably, as we're going to come back to when it comes to the nature of salvation, some would say Jesus at times teaches a works-based salvation and Paul is clearly teaching a you know grace-based salvation. Why do you not think that Paul invented Christianity and that overall Paul's message is consistent with the message of Jesus. There's several reasons. I tell the story in the book about a good friend of mine who basically said, Jesus, I need to believe, but I don't have to believe Paul. And I pointed out, well, you know, how do we know about Jesus? Oh, the Apostles. Who was Paul? He was an Apostle.

So are you going to pick and choose the Apostles? I mean, you can't really do that. But her issue was that Paul felt harsh. And so I guess there's two levels, there's a perception level and then actually what they say, that for them, they felt that Paul sounded harsh and Jesus sounded loving. And so well, you need to go read Matthew 24 if you think Jesus was always loving. I mean, he called the Pharisees walking defilements, you know, whitewashed tombs. I mean, Jesus can really be harsh on people. In one of the earlier chapters of John,

the disciples, people who thought they were their disciples said that, you know, they fell away and Jesus says, well, they weren't one of my sheep you know that's pretty harsh I couldn't get away saying that from the pulpit when I was preaching and frankly you look at some of the discussions of love who can separate us from love of Christ and for love of God in Christ Jesus in Romans 8 you know nothing, nothing can. And so it's a matter of emphasis. It's not an issue of whether one was loving and one was harsh. And I think the answer is they're

writing for different audiences for different purposes. Jesus's life was about the in-breaking of the kingdom of God and the conquering the kingdom of Satan and pushing to Jerusalem to die for our sins and then be raised again. And so he's ushering in the kingdom of God and trying to talk about entering the kingdom of God, you know, unless your righteousness exceeds out of the scribes and Pharisees, you won't even enter the kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven. of God, or Kingdom of Heaven. Paul was trying to deal with specific churches and specific issues,

and he had his own vocabulary. And so you have different settings, different purposes, and so they're going to express their truths differently, but they're not incompatible. And Craig, in one of his chapters in his book, the Big Thick one, does a really good job of spelling out where we think that this is a real difference but it's really not. I mean, blessed are the poor in spirit is justification by faith. I mean, I think when you look at what those two phrases mean, they're exactly the same thing. We come to Christ by recognizing that we have nothing in our hands we bring, but to your cross we cling, as the old hymn says it. And that means it's an issue of faith and not of works, because our hands are empty. So I think that the differences on the surface are more a sense of the words they use and who they're talking to. But at the essence, I just don't see a difference. I think it's interesting that both, you know, Jesus' words are recorded in the Gospels,

which is one kind of genre. Paul's are in letters, which is another kind of genre. Right. And that's a good answer too. Of course, the words of Jesus are still during the time of the Old Covenant, anticipating his death that will complete it. Paul's is minimally decades afterwards trying to make sense of what this means for the local church. Right.

So there's really some significant differences we have to keep in mind. We can also ask the question, did the early church feel free to change the words of Jesus to fit Paul? And I think you make a great point that there were so many controversies in the early church that if they wanted to settle, they could just invent, well, Jesus said A, B, or C, and they don't, which tells me that they had some commitment to what Jesus actually said, and they knew the wider community would call them on that if they start invented sayings of Jesus. Yeah, the whole issue of circumcision would have gone away

if Matthew said, you know, don't you remember, and I'm really Jewish, so I'm the one who's gonna say this, don't you remember Jesus said that circumcision is of no avail? I mean, you're right, it's been so simple for them to make up something to deal with the issue. Peter, didn't you remember Jesus said that it's okay for you to eat with Gentiles? You know, Galatians, Acts, so easy to solve problems, but they didn't do it. Time and time again, they didn't do it. And then the flip side of that is that they kept

embarrassing statements and, you know, you're going to go out and do your ministry and I'm going to return before everything is done and he doesn't. To the head of the Jerusalem church, he calls them Satan and tells them to get behind him. And there's all kinds of these missing and embarrassing. And, you know, unless you, you have to hit your mother and father. If you're going to follow me. And there's a lot of these kinds of things that if they weren't really interested in what Jesus actually said and did, they would not be in the Bible. But they're there because the writers thought it was important

to be historically accurate. Like eat my flesh and drink my blood almost sounds pagan. You know, there's all these times where Peter's like, should I stay? Should I go? Like, I have always thought that's a really a fair point. Now, a big objection that comes up and in my own journey, you know, growing up in Christian home with a father who was and is an apologist, I went through a period of questioning.

I remember the first time I got online, this is mid-90s, and found this list of dozens of apparent contradictions. And it really unsettled me. At that point, I was probably 19 years old and was like, oh my goodness, there's contradictions all over the place. Now, I want your broad approach to contradictions, but there's a couple of points that I make. I'd say, one, if there were contradictions all over the place. Now I want your broad approach to contradictions, but there's a couple of points that I make. I'd say one, if there were contradictions in the Bible that

could be established, this would not make me cease to be a Christian. What would undermine the faith is if Jesus was not risen, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15. So if there really were contradictions, we'd say we got to revisit what we mean by the Bible being inspired and or inerrant. We have to rethink if we got the right books,

but we could still know Jesus rose to the grave and have confidence in these stories, even if there were contradictions. That's point one, because I want to put the main thing where the main thing is. But second, a difference is not a contradiction. I studied philosophy, so I studied logic. And one reporting one angel, the other gospel reporting two isn't

a contradiction. A contradiction is when you affirm and deny the same principle, referring to the same place and the same time. So same place, same time, it is raining and it is not raining. Those are not reconcilable contradictions. So those are two things I point out. Would you add anything generally as you look at the claim of contradictions before we probe into a couple of particular ones? Well, I mean, one would be an example.

Can you trust Bill Mounce's Greek textbook? And if in the textbook he says, in in 1493 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Okay, I'm off by a year, right? At one point you go, okay, Mounce was wrong, but that doesn't mean his whole approach to teaching Greek is wrong. And so, you know, what I've learned from people like Howard Marshall and some of the Brits

that have really high views of scriptures but are not inerrantists is that they can trust the Bible even though they think this one got it wrong and that one got it wrong. So you're right. It would be a major issue that would have to say if they can't get that right historically, then I'm not sure I can trust anything they say. So yeah, I think that that's a valid point. Your question was about whether things would, I think if there were a lot of contradictions,

that would bother me. And because you know, the old argument that if they can't, if they keep making historical mistakes, time after time after time, then they haven't done their homework or they're not trustworthy or something like that. I remember going, I got a really good friend whose sons walked away from the faith

and researched it heavily and referred to a website that had like 200 contradictions in the Bible. So to help my friend, I went and read them. Every one of them was a misunderstanding of the text. Interesting. He said, this verse says this and this verse says this, and they're contradicting. Well, that's because you misinterpreted the verse,

and it was really obvious things. And I thought, no, you know, but that's, you know, what's out there and all these lists of changes. And so, I mean, part of the answer simply say, have you interpreted the verses properly and the vast majority? I know the other thing I wanted to say and I say in the book is that whenever I'm approached with the topic of I can't trust about because of the contradictions, I always by saying well, could you give me the one that bothers you the most and let's talk about it well

I've never had anyone give me the one that's bothering on the most because So far they don't know the problems there are problem passages But the vat my experience is the vast majority of people don't know what those problems are. And so that's how when you're talking to someone about apparent contradictions, you always start by saying, can you, can you give me the one that bothers you the most? Because that'll tell you whether they're, that's the real question. Or if the real question is behind that smoke screen and they just don't want to accept the lordship of Christ.

And so they're just going to say, well, I don't trust the Bible because it's full of errors. Oh, I've heard it's full of errors, but I don't want to believe it. So I'm going to believe that it's full of errors. That's a very common thing to happen. I think you're right that how charitable or not charitable we are to the text and apparent contradictions

can shape our motivations going to it. Now the sword can cut both ways. I've read the Quran, I've read the Book of Mormon, and I found contradictions therein. And I've also noticed to myself, I'm like, oh, I can explain with the Bible ones, but I accept those of other texts. And it's forced me to go, okay, am I being consistent here and being charitable across and not picking and choosing? and it's forced me to go, okay, am I being consistent here and being charitable across and not picking and choosing?

I think Christians need to ask themselves this honestly as well. Now let's just look at two big ones that come up. I remember back in high school, I was having a conversation with a friend, a Mormon, a member of the church, and she is Christ Latter-day Saints. And he was pushing more towards a work salvation.

I was talking about salvation by grace and I said, look, Paul says it's by grace, not by works in Romans. And he goes, what about James? James also refers to Abraham and says, nope, it's not by faith alone, it's by works. Is there a contradiction here? Is there a contradiction here? My memory, not living in aural culture, is faulty. Does James actually say it's not by faith? I think you're right. You're absolutely right. I think you've created a little more of a tension. There's different ways to handle it.

I like the simple answer that the word justification can refer to how you come into a relationship with Christ, and the word can also refer to how do you live in a relationship with Christ as one who is justified, as one who has been declared righteous. And in that case, they're talking about two different things. We all know that what's frustrating is that both authors use the same verse in Genesis, the same illustration of Abraham to prove what appear to be contradictory things. And I don't know if James is trying to correct Paul. I'm not sure that's the right way to approach the book of James. But James is, in his context, is hitting the whole issue of the necessity of sanctification of Lordship pretty hard and To people who perhaps had heard Paul's talk

He doesn't want them to misunderstand Paul and so he chooses this illustration to say there's more going on in Justification than simply coming to faith. It's how you live. In fact, how you live shows whether you actually were justified to begin with. So that's a classic example of an interpretive issue, but it's one that Martin Luther did not want James in the canon because of that particular verse and that particular misunderstanding. I've generally approached it looking at Paul's talking

about our justification before God vertically what salvation means and James is talking about our justification horizontally before People who don't know our hearts but see our works. It's justification but in a different fashion I think that's a piece of it that I might throw in there with your distinction as well. But you're right, there's no clear-cut contradiction although there's a difference in their audience and their

focus and even the theological point that they're making. What about, let's get back to the Gospels. The timing of the Last Supper seems like there's a contradiction between the synoptics and between John. And at least on the surface, this is a pretty good challenge that I've heard frequently raised. But you don't buy it. Why not? Well, first of all, it would be, how could they make a mistake? You're in the most pivotal night, well, maybe other than the night after the resurrection, you're in the most pivotal night of their entire lives. And to make a mistake that bad,

I don't know who would make that kind of mistake. I think the answer is you work backwards. Both, all four gospels, John and the synoptics, agree that Jesus died on Friday. So regardless of what the meal was or the timing on the meal, if you follow through on the chronologies, they have him dying on Friday to get him off the cross

before the three stars come out the evening of our Friday, the beginning of Shabbat. And it's an issue of cultic cleanliness. They wanted to get them down. So when you work back, and then you take the fact that in both, in all four, it's so obviously a Passover meal that it'd be really weird if they were two different meals one day apart. The trouble has to do with the timing of the eating the Passover. And for John, it's really easy to see that as a reference not to the Passover meal itself, but to the second most important meal

of the Passover week, which was the next day. And I give the specifics in the book. And so you're talking about why the Jews wanted to get the body, Jesus' body down from the cross. But again, I go back to the fact that there's obviously the same meal and it's obviously on Thursday night because he dies on Friday afternoon. So whatever that meal is that the Pharisees

wanted to go to in John is not the meal that Jesus just had. So I just think, no, I think working backwards from Friday afternoon, they have to be the same meal and the timing is the same. So focusing on what they get right and where they agree, work backwards, they're talking about a different meal, is the simple quick answer. Okay, all right. Now I'd remind people that when it comes to a contradiction, we don't necessarily have to resolve with certainty

what the truth is. Sometimes they don't have the information. But a possible way of wedding the two together is at least enough logically speaking to remove the claim that there is an inherent contradiction. And that's just how logic works. Yeah. And that's the issue of the burden of proof. And you always feel the burden of proof is on the other person, not on you. That's true. person. Not, not on you. But on harmonization, my approach has always been can I conceive of a

situation in which both accounts could have given rise to two different accounts that are different on the service and yet are relaying the same information. And that's just how we tell stories. We do not tell stories the same way. George Guthrie is a good friend of mine and teaches up at Regent now. And George always did this when he was at Union University. He would introduce the problem of the synoptics. He would have two students go sit out in the hall. He for a half hour, he would explain, you know, how the synoptics were put together. And then you'd call one of the kids in and say, so tell me what happened the last half hour. And he would explain whatever happened of the kids in and say, So tell me what happened the last half hour, and he and he would explain whatever happened in the hallway. When he was done, George

had had the other student come in and say, Okay, so tell me what happened in the hallway. And it wasn't more than 15 seconds into the second students discussion that the students just started laughing and giggling. What because like, were you in the same hall? Were you in the hall in the same century? I mean, did one of you get teleported to Mars? I mean, it was kind of like, their stories were different because they saw different things, different things stuck with them. They wanted to make different points, but they were, it's the same half hour in the same

hallway. Both are right, they're just different. That's how we tell stories. So they didn't say he got it wrong, they're just like, wow, you saw this differently in different details, that makes sense. That's a fair example. I think my favorite part in your book,

because this is actually where I'm less an expert on, is you make this distinction between the manuscripts, kind of the Western tradition Byzantine and the Alexandrian tradition and this is your area of specialty So sometimes when it comes to trusting the texture not we just look at how early our copies and the number of Copies which is a simple fairway overall to try to assess the text. But it's not quite that simple, you argue, when we probe into the details. What are these different lines and why does it matter to how faithfully we can reconstruct the text?

Let me give you a modern example. So let's say a lecture in a freshman New Testament survey class and for some reason only half the students were there. Well, let's say there were two students, but let's say another 20 survey class. And for some reason, only half the students were there. Let's say there were two students. But let's say another 20 skip class. So there were two students. One was a really good student and he took careful notes. He rewrote his notes that evening.

His handwriting was clear. It was right then. And the other student, a little sloppier, messier handwriting, can't always read what he says. He waited three or four days to, I need to write down what Mount said about such and such, so he writes it down. Then all the other students go,

hey, we need to copy your notes. Who are they going to go to? You could have one student come to the careful student, and all the other students go to the sloppy students. You have one student come to the careful student and all the other students go to the sloppy students. So you have one copy here and they say you have 20 copies over here. The fact that you have 20 copies made from a bad script doesn't make that number important. That's what I'm getting at.

That's why text critics talk about you weigh manuscripts, you don't count them. Because it doesn't matter how many copies of a defective manuscript you have. That's not a reason to believe it. Yeah, and technically in text criticism today, they don't talk about families and manuscripts, but it's kind of how I was raised, and it's an easy way to get your hand around things. And that manuscripts like the Alexandrian manuscripts tended to come from the area of Alexandria, and their common characteristics are authenticity. These are some of the most accurate manuscripts we have, the least number of obvious changes in them. And they're also very, very old. We also have another group of manuscript. Let me jump in before we move. They're old

and preserve well because Alexandria is in Egypt and has conditions that lend themselves to preserving ancient documents well. Is that a part of the story why we can trust these? Oh yeah. I mean, Sinaiticus is four century. And so it's, it's much closer to the events than like the Byzantine that we'll talk about in a second. So you have, you have, they were discovered more recently in the last hundred years. Sinaiticus was, was founded at St. Catherine's monastery in Sinai, hence Sinaiticus. But it's they were in fact, when you date them, they go back way, way before the other manuscripts that we had. You know, when you think about when Erasmus, when he did his Greek texts, that's the basis of King James,

basically, he was dealing with 11th century manuscripts, manuscripts that they themselves have been copied over 1000 years after the event. Now all of a sudden you've got Sinidicus copied 400 years after the event and so there's a natural tendency to trust the older manuscripts. But again it's more than just the age, the scribes in Alexandria, one of the the Alexandrian libraries, one of the ancient wonders of the world, they were known for careful copying. Another set of the Western, and as a church expanded west towards Rome, they needed Bibles, but sometimes you call these the missionary texts, because take an example, let's say you went to a place

that had never heard of the Bible and didn't have any church background, and your goal was to evangelize them. Would you take an, I pick on two here, pick an NASB or an NLT, a New American Standard Bible or a New Living Bible? Well, you would take the New Living Bible. Yes, the New Living is a little more expansive, a little you would take the new living Bible. Yes, the new

living is a little more expansive, a little more interpretive. All translations are interpretive. The NLT is a little more interpretive, but it's understandable. And that's what you would tend to use. When I was pastoring, we had outreaches. We used the NIRV, the reader's version of the NIV, because it's at a third grade level. It's designed for people who basically are learning English as a second language, where our church was, there were a lot of Russian immigrants. I'm not going to give them an ESV kind of Bible. It's too hard for them to understand.

Well, that's what happened in the missionary text, the Western text. And that's why you mentioned earlier, Axis 8.5 or something like that percent longer in these manuscripts. Why? Because they're expanding them, they're explaining them, they're conflating stories to make sure they get all the facts right. I mean, there's all kinds of things going on in an attempt to make them understandable. And so the Western text is not considered very reliable,

even though there's quite a few of them. And then what happened eventually, you got the Byzantine text. When Constantine legalized Christianity, he had Eusebius write 50 copies of the Bible. Maybe that was the beginning of the Byzantine text type, but these again are ones that are a little more expansive. You know, this type does not come up by prayer,

and the Byzantine text adds and fasting on the exorcism the disciples couldn't do. And you know, you have the longer ending in Mark, you have the story of the woman caught in adultery, you have for that is the kingdom of the power and the glory of the first. See, these things, if you look at the earliest manuscripts, none of those things are there. We often talk about the 17 verses missing from modern translations. Well, they're not missing. They were added hundreds of years later, but they were put into the Byzantine text. And then when the Byzantine Empire was overrun, the Greek scholars fled to Europe, and they had already made a lot of manuscripts. They continued to make a lot of manuscripts,

and those are what we call the Byzantine. So that's a longer explanation you may have wanted. But yeah, so those are the different text types, the different families. Oh, that's really helpful and fascinating. Let's go back to the difference between the Western tradition and I think you said the Alexandrian tradition or the Byzantine, correct me, where there's the 8.5% difference in length of the Book of Acts. One interpretation, I guess if I were a skeptic,

I'd push back and I'd say, look, see how these Christians handle the text. We think, they think it's the word of God, they care about reliability, they expand this thing 10 percent. You know, in the book of Luke, that's a couple, three chapters if you add acts to it. That doesn't seem the care and precision of a people we should trust with a text. What would you say?

I think a lot of it has to do with actually look at the changes they made. And what you'll find is that they're not destructive of the text. They're trying to explain the text. That's an act of piety. It'd be just like if I would read a verse when I was preaching and then paraphrase it and fill in some of the missing pieces, I wouldn't do that in Bible translation, but I would do it when I'm preaching because I want the people to understand the text. So they talk about all the differences among the 5600 Greek manuscripts, but a whole lot of them, well, the vast majority are unintentional and meaningless changes, but whole lot of them well the vast majority are unintentional and meaningless changes

But a lot of them are just you can see the scribes trying to help people understand So in John 5 good example, there's a pool of Bethesda and a bunch of people laid there And Jesus goes and talks to the guy and says, you know, you know how long you've been here And why are you here? Well, hey, no, he says why are you here? Well, he says, why are you here? And he go, wait a minute. Why are these people lying around this pool? Well, verse four, their names the Lord came down, stirred up the water, and the first person in was healed.

Now, I'm really glad that's not what John wrote, because I would have trouble with that. That's just magical. And that doesn't sound like how the gospel and how Jesus works at all. But that verse was added because, and it shouldn't have been, but it was added because the scribe saw a hole in the story.

Well, why are these people lying around? Oh, there's a tradition that an angel came down. And this is one of those things that probably was originally written in the margin. And then as the new scripts went by, it moved into the text itself. So you have to look at them. I get asked so much when I speak on translation issues

about the 17 missing verses in the NIV. And well, they're missing in all modern translations. They're missing because they are not original. They were added. But I actually did a website, missingbibleverses.com. I said, I'm just gonna list these 17 verses and as you go through, they're completely inconsequential except for the first John five and the issue of Trinity.

And the other ones, they're just adding in verses from parallel stories and other gospels or trying to explain things. And so I'd say, yeah, I wish they hadn't been added, but I do understand that when you're trying to share the gospel with someone that doesn't understand your backstory and doesn't understand your doctrines, I'm going to try to find a way to communicate with them. And I think that's what's going on in the Western text. Now you're on the ESV translation team, right?

Now I had Wayne Grudemann a few months ago just looking at his life and his experience and just the people who shaped him. It was a fascinating interview and he's also obviously on that team and talked about the process of people voting on versus and the length it would take. But do you take, what manuscripts are you operating off? Presumably you go back to the earliest in the Alexandrian line. What's before you that you're trying to translate to? The default text is the Nestle Elan 28 or maybe it was 27, and I'm not sure. But we are very fortunate that there are a group of highly qualified scholars, textual critics,

that have looked at the 5600 manuscripts, some in part, some in some fragmentary, have applied the principles of text criticism and have come up with a text that is so, we believe it's so close to the original that there are a few places where we're not sure. We don't know whether it's Gaterines or Gargazines. We don't know whether it's Basaedia or Basatha. We don't know in places where John spelled his name with one N, one new or two, or whether it's SD or S10, two different forms of exactly the same word. I mean, there are questions, but the vast majority of them are inconsequential. They've been able to make the, the scholars have been able to make the decisions

as to what they think is original. And it's really interesting that liberal, this is one of the few things that liberals and conservatives agree on. I mean, we don't agree on hardly anything, but we agree that text critics have done their job. And so that's what both translation committees are. Now we know text criticism, we have the apparatus,

we see where there are variants and there's some discussion about it, but it takes quite a strong argument to differ from that particular text. The Old Testament's a little different. The starting point's always a Masoretic text, but there are just times where the Masoretic text doesn't make sense.

And if we can find a consistent reading based on the Septuagint or the Syriac or some of the other early translations, and especially if it involves just changing the vowels to the Hebrew text called repointing, because the vowels are not on the original text, then we felt comfortable in both committees, we feel comfortable in repointing the Hebrew and bringing the Hebrew in line with the Septuagint and some of the other translations. So we're fortunate for the people who have gone before us. I appreciate that you point out just the depth of scholarship and care and work that's gone

into this that can give us confidence. But also so many Christians think the Bible was like lowered down from heaven in English and then they discover we're not really sure about Garrisonis, Gadarenis and a few other passages like shatters their faith. So this honest approach, at least I interpret it as honest and careful approach, I think it's actually the most helpful for Christians to know as well. A handful of other questions for you before we wrap up. What's the quick answer?

I just discovered that one of the top, if not the most common translations that is used and bought still today is the King James translation. Now, it's a beautiful translation. And of course, everybody who buys the King James is not necessarily a King James only proponent. But like as simply as you can, like what would be your straightforward Twitter response to somebody who says the other lines are unreliable,

you're compromising if you don't use the King James? Well, first of all, I'd, can you understand the King James? And the whole purpose of translation is to understand it. And I don't know what the purpose QD of naughtiness is, but that's the King James translation in James. The whole point of translation is to understand it. So even though it's beautiful, Elizabethan English, doesn't mean I want to read it and try to understand it. That's part of it. But the Twitter response is the Greek manuscripts that King James is based on come out of the 11th century,

and all modern translations come out of manuscripts that are much earlier in that 4th, 5th, 6th modern translations come out of manuscripts that are much earlier in that fourth, fifth, sixth century with many less apparent changes. And I'm going to choose the Greek texts that have less apparent changes than more. So is it the Byzantine text or the Western? It's the Byzantine text. That the King James only comes out of. And now we have these Alexandrian lines that are not only earlier but more reliable. So do you think, what if somebody just used the King James without using those? Do you still feel like, hey, overall you can know the gospel gospel it's still a pretty good translation when you say whoa timeout don't use this we have may more accurate

ones this is misleading Bruce walkie says that all my all major translations will lead you to the cross none will lead you to heresy and I think that's true of the King James as well now my family's from gravel switch Kentucky hillbillies and it is my cousins who are handling snakes and drinking poison because of the longer ending of Mark. Now, I'm thankful that grandpa left Gravel Switch and I don't have that approach to life. So yeah, there are some kind of important things in those verses when you are trying to do an exorcism. Do you need to pray or do you need to pray and fast?

I mean, so there are some differences that will affect how we live, but certainly nothing major at all in how we believe. You know, when I'm reading your book, almost all of it is about the gospels and the New Testament. And then when you get to the last chapter, it was like, oh, it's about not only a historical or a textual issue,

but the character of God. And I wondered as I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, I write books that I include certain chapters and content for different reasons, depending upon my audience. Why did you include this chapter on the claim that the Old Testament God is violent and respond to some of these charges like genocide and maybe one or two points that you think are significant without going into all the depth against that charge. Yeah, I included it because the publisher told me I had to. Okay, fair enough,

that's an honest answer. I want to call this why I trust the New Testament because I'm not a no testament guy and I know some of them could write that and and hopefully This book will sell well and Zahneman will see the need for doing a more thorough discussion of the Old Testament So that's why sir, but you're right in that When it gets right down to it, I think the most difficult Issue in life is the problem of pain and if if the Old Testament if if you're reading the Old Testament presents a picture of God who doesn't care about your pain or causes pain or doesn't step in to

stop pain when he could, then that's just a massive block. And I think this is actually the bigger issue. I think when people say, I don't trust the Bible because of contradictions, I think the real issue is they don't like the God of the Bible. And so I'm really glad I didn't talk about that. And I think the old answer is the right answer, that you have to balance God's holiness that moves him to justice

and God's love that moves him to forgiveness. And it's in the balance of those two qualities and what they produce that the Christian life is lived. And people who say, well, God's cruel, they don't know how much he really loves them. God loved the world. I mean, I'm reformed, but I think the world means the world, so that anyone who believes won't perish but have eternal life. God sent his son not to condemn the world but to save it. This is the message of the Old and the New Testament, but you have to come to a point where you look at what God does. Really, he exterminates every single person, parents, children, animals in the flood, except for this one family.

What kind of God does that? Well, it's a God who is also just. And there is an end to God's patience. And at the end of God's patience lies justice. And what you have is an intrusion of the end times into time where the final judgment that we will all someday, we'll be able to watch it, we won't, we've already been justified, but we'll be, we'll be able to see that what happened in the flood is also going to happen at the end of time. This is what happens for sin. So I just think that's a critical issue. One of the issues. And let me say, and say this in the book, because it can come across being so callous saying that we've had two children die. One is a miscarriage and one four hours after birth in my arms. Wow. We know what pain is. We went through a horrible experience at a church,

which was far worse than two girls dying. This is something that we've had, Robin and I, my wife, have had to deal with. So I don't want to sound flippant or callous. This is something we've had to work through. And you come to a point, you say, I just have to believe it, or I have to jettison the whole thing. And I can't do that, so I choose to believe.

Thanks for sharing that heartache that you went through. I didn't think your book came across callous, but I think sometimes a short answer can feel incomplete to the emotional depth and other issues at play. You spent your life studying the scriptures, studying the Bible. You've written this popular level book.

So obviously you revisited some of these issues. You mentioned the one about just dealing with the loss of two kids that I, in some ways, just can't comprehend the pain of that. How has your confidence or just your life been shaped by studying the Bible academically? Has it made you more skeptical? Has it made you skeptical and confident?

Has it drawn you to your knees to trust God? How does it affect you personally is what I'm getting at. I've tried to be skeptical, but I'm not any good at it. I mean, I try to be honest in my academic inquiry and saying, okay, I'm going to look at the 400,000 manuscript errors, according to Bart Ehrman. Does that bother me at all? And so, I mean, I've tried to, but my, the only downside of my academic training is that it's been hard. Academics can get cold in calculating. And at times it's, you forget that the ultimate goal is to love

God and love one another. And so academic inquiry can sometime get in the way of what it's supposed to. But now I never really had any serious questions even when the girls died, even when the church happened. I didn't understand, but I don't have to understand. There's a lot of things I don't understand about my wife, but I still love her to pieces. You know, I mean love, commitment to, isn't based on understanding every little piece about it. But so it's, for me this study has just been affirming and it's you know I look at the arguments that are made and I try to understand them academically initially and I work through them and I just I just don't think they hold water I just

think for everything that's written it take genocide for example and the killing of the Canaanites well you know my son came home from school that goes to a Christian school here and he said you know, my son came home from school that goes to a Christian school here. And he said, you know, how could God commit genocide? And I said, well, what's genocide? Well, genocide is the killing off of a race for ethnic reasons. I said, there's no genocide on God's part in the Old Testament.

This was a punishment for the Canaanite sin. And the Canaanites could have repented like Rahab. They could have joined the Jewish nation or they could have left. There's all kinds of thingsites could have repented like Rahab. They could have joined the Jewish nation or they could have left. There's all kinds of things it could have done, but they were incredibly sinful. And God's patience after 400 years had worn thin and it was punishable, but that's not genocide.

So it's when you learn the facts and you can see things clearly, you go, oh, okay, I can understand that. That doesn't bother me. see things clearly you go, oh that's okay I can understand that that does that doesn't bother me. Right after this question Bill and I got cut off and didn't get a chance because of the audio to wrap up but I actually think this is a great place to end with him sharing some of his personal account is how the scripture shaped him. So for those of you who's hung with me I think his book is

fantastic, Why I Trust the Bible, William D. Mounts. It's a wonderful, popular level book with some depth that I would encourage. And don't forget to think about joining me at Biola Apologetics. We have a fully online program, top rated. Would love to have you in the class. Why Galat is Evil in Defense of the Resurrection. Information is below.